Koen VanMechelen loves chickens. Live chickens, stuffed chickens, videos of chickens, paintings made with egg tempera. Saturday night at Conner Contemporary, VanMechelen’s “Cosmopolitan Chicken Project (DC)” opens; it’ll run to Dec. 31. According to the press release, the Belgian artist is “systematically crossing all breeds of chickens to create a world-mongrel chicken.”

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According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C., held an old-fashioned book burning last week (above is an AP video on the same).

Now, my people didn’t burn books when I was growing up, but my youth pastor did ask me to toss my copy of Pyromania, and my grandfather, an Episcopal priest, refused to allow books written by Carl Jung inside his house. Also, I once had to scribble an ode to masturbation on a slip of paper during mass and throw it into a cauldron of fire.

Based on these criteria, I feel qualified to offer the following FAQ for attending a book burning.

Read More “What is the Proper Etiquette for a Book Burning?” »

It’s FotoWeek DC, a celebration of local and international shutterbugs. But between the dozens of events featuring thousands of images from photographers in 39 states and 28 countries, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by choice. If you only have time for 10 events, make it these ones:
Read More “10 Things You Should See for FotoWeek DC” »

Story/Stereo—a concert/reading series that pairs local musicians with local writers/poets—just announced two new events.

First, Asa Osborne—formerly of Baltimore gnostic/punk quartet Lungfish—will perform with his guitar/organ project, Zomes. Lisa Selin Davis will read. That’s kind of a tough gig, though, considering the last person to put words in or around Osborne’s music was Dan Higgs.

Then, in February, J. Robbins—fresh from reissuing the late ’90s masterpiece For Your Own Special Sweetheart and performing on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon with the reunited Jawbox—will perform his first ever solo show. Marianne Villanueva and Steve Fellner will read.

Dates and details after the jump:
Read More “Story/Stereo Announces Two New Shows” »

It’s one thing to write a break-up record. But recording it while your ex looks on?

“The songs were an actual communication, because he was very present,” says Sarah Assbring, referring to the recording sessions for Love Is not Pop, her latest album as El Perro del Mar. She built a studio in Gothenburg, Sweden, several years ago with her then boyfriend, and although they broke up over a year ago, he’s still the sound engineer. “He was more or less looking me in the eye while I was doing the vocals.”

Awash in echo and atmosphere, Love Is not Pop is a remarkably spacey album for an artist who cut her teeth making sweet, sad, girl-group-sounding indie pop. Lyrically, though, the record is grounded. When Assbring sings lines like “We’ve been together for so long/I gotta get smart” and “It is something to have wept as we have wept,” she says, she means every crestfallen syllable.

Read More “All Is Strange in Love and Pop: El Perro del Mar @ 9:30 Club” »

Vortex with author's traveling companion

Washington City Paper: What’s your name?
Luca Vortex: Luca Vortex.

That’s not your real name. That’s a punk name.
That is how everybody knows me.

How old are you?
33.

Are you familiar with go-go music?
Read More “Ask a European About Washington, D.C.: 2) Italy” »

A Friday item, in which we feature a playlist suggested by one of our critics—or by a friendly guest.

Christian McBride has laid down records with so many jazz icons that to list them here would be sort of obnoxious. (It would also require us to discuss the latter-day work of Sting.) Suffice it to say that whatever jazz greats were alive in the ’90s, McBride played with them—and made their records a better place to spend some time.

Mike West, City Paper’s jazz guy-in-chief, calls McBride “the most revered bass player of his generation.”

More important, perhaps, is McBride’s statesmanlike work as a bandleader and composer. McBride’s new band, Inside Straight, which backs him on this year’s Kind of Brown, represents a return to a traddier brand of music (what the bassist describes as “right down the pike, straight-ahead, swinging jazz”) after the forward-leaning funk of the Christian McBride Band. Not to say that the dude’s playing it safe or anything…but if John McLaughlin wanders into Blues Alley this weekend, he’s not gonna hear anything to turn his hair unwhite.

Still! A man’s allowed his guilty pleasures. In anticipation of his four sets this weekend, I phoned McBride to solicit a playlist of his favorite non-jazz songs. Predictably, they’re heavy on the low end. (Hey, a bassist has to look out for his own.) Also predictably, one of the songs is by Sting.

Playlist & videos below the interview.

Read More “End-of-Week Mixtape: Christian McBride’s Non-Jazz Playlist” »

Sampling the thought streams of D.C. musicians past and present.

Tittsworth:

-A man has our elevator filled to the brim w/plants. Its like a 2 acre jungle crammed into a cubicle. he’s complaining the door won’t shut.

-i think i just discovered the malkovich floor of my building? what exactly is going on the 3rd floor? :-)

-Mother fucker, I’m trying to watch the lost boys!!

Wale:

-dear ucb..i will go to breakfast w/ yall but i am NOT goin to eat a Dinosaur sized pancake at “The Griddle”

-everybody askin what kinda shoes im wearin…haa

-09 airmaxes http://pic.gd/38d0d6

Casper Bangs:

-is listening to some old songs he wrote and thinking that they are not that good.

-The Whitespace 7″ should in stores soon, but it’s available now here: http://www.dischord.com/release/ws01/whitspace

Tabi Bonney:

-My bookbag smells like it’s been eatin chicken behind my back…literally

-Somebody somewhere has candy paint…on their house though.

-I think I’m just gonna say “Jordan!” after I have sex or something from now on.

Thanks in part to Don DeLillo’s 1973 novel Great Jones Street, it didn’t take long for the rock-star-toiling-away-in-seclusion narrative to go from the stuff of critical legend to obvious fodder for parody. Nevermind that two years later saw the release and instant canonization of Bob Dylan and the Band’s long-buried The Basement Tapes—the inspiration, in fact, for the DeLillo character Bucky Wunderlick’s “The Mountain Tapes.” And so for listeners, the brilliant, hermetic artist has persisted, both as a reductive, suspect concept and as an undeniably seductive one. Listed here, some examples of the latter.

The D.C./Baltimore psych-folk act Le Loup retreated to a cabin in North Carolina to record much of its latest album, Family (out now on Hardly Art) and the result is druggy, country-fried, and poppy. Take “Grow,” which sports what might be the best pairing of Beach Boys harmonies and the “Be My Baby” beat since, well, the Beach Boys. But the real innovation here is space: Where past Le Loup songs were concise and linear, Family’s breathe and frolic and expand. The band—which performs Saturday at the Black Cat with Pree—recently recorded a session for All Our Noise. Check it out:

More records made in wooded seclusion after the jump: Reluctant backwoods Svengalis, some latter-day Johnny Cash, and brassy mountain ditties!

Read More “Clip Job: Five Records Made in Cabins (Other than Bon Iver)” »